Something Wicked This Way Comes

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a 1962 dark fantasy novel by Ray Bradbury and the second book of his Green Town sequence. It is set in a small Illinois town in the autumn, and its central figures are two thirteen-year-old friends, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway.

The carnival arrives in the middle of the night, and its proprietor, Mr Dark, brings with him a carousel that changes the age of anyone who rides it. Jim wants the ride the way a boy wants to be older, Will is afraid of it, and the two of them spend the novel being tested by what the carnival offers and by the people in town who have already accepted its bargain.

Bradbury writes the book in a lyrical, image-heavy prose closer to poetry than to the horror fiction of the period, and its subject is the wish to be someone else. Green Town is the same setting as Dandelion Wine, and the two are usually read together, one as summer and this one as the autumn that follows it.